Sunday, January 13, 2013

The VA Domiciliary at Temple, Texas, is the site of an intensive therapeutic program for sexual assault

- Third and last of a series -

Temple - Patient X is young for a Cold Warrior - less than 40 years of age.

He
is one of America's veterans of what is often called America's
forgotten war, the Korean War.

Its
veterans hold that it was largely forgotten, even during its hottest
periods, derisively called a “police action” by the United
Nations, and then filed away in the annals of the affairs of state,
its warriors ignored, their exploits and victories unheralded, their
tragedies largely unmourned.

Freedom House at the Line of Demarcation on the DMZ

The
Korean War experience spans generations of men, their thunder stolen
by diplomatic euphemisms, political correctness, international
expediency.

But
the truth is, the Korean War is still very much an active war. There
has never been anything like a declaration of conditions of
surrender, only a cessation of hostilities maintained at an edgy
place called the DMZ, a three-mile-wide swath of territory that
straddles the Korean peninsula, and the Joint Security Area, or JSA,
at the “village of peace,” Panmunjom.

Patient
X served in this high tension hell hole as a military policeman. When
intelligence analysts recruited him into a spy network, he played
along the way any young man would. After all, in his youthful
perception, nothing in the world had ever gone wrong. Chances would
be, he predicted in his young man's way, nothing ever would. Let the
good times roll.

And
then came the fateful morning when he woke up in a ditch, wounded in
the most personal of ways, his honor shattered, his perception of his
manhood thrust into limbo.

He
is desperately seeking recovery at a local VA hospital after a decade
and a half of marginal employment, substance abuse, and aimless
wanderings, sometimes with very abusive people who have no regard for
his best interests. It's a self-destructive pattern from which he is
looking to free himself.

Recently,
while on break from a therapy session with female patients who have
suffered the same thing – sexual assault - he watched a female VA
police officer escort a convicted criminal into the Domiciliary, past
the front reception desk, and into a more private area.

The
man was shackled at wrists and ankles, a chain around his midriff
connecting the two sets of cuffs, forced to waddle along at an
uncomfortable pace set by the policewoman. The fact that a man in
trouble with the law was checking into the treatment program is, in
and of itself nothing unusual. Courts often divert veterans who are
accused or convicted to the VA therapy programs.

Most
patients arrive unshackled and unescorted by police. They enter
treatment voluntarily, and though the rules are strict – no
weapons, alcohol or drugs allowed, strict adherence to curfew, and no
visitors in the living areas – they are free to come and go as they
please.

But
this was gratuitous, somehow startling, rather vicious and
sick-making in its appearances, says Patient X.

A
familiar feeling of rage consumed him as he watched his fellow
patients recoil in horror. He felt the burn of true empathy, shared
their pain.

Why
should these women, traumatized by their military experiences, suffer
the same kind of unsightly, disturbing scenes at the time of their
treatment for invisible wounds? The system both inside the military
establishment and in the civilian world has too often and for too
long blamed themselves for what a predatory actor backed by a
rapacious system did to them.

He
wound up in the office of the director of the program, buttonholed
the chief of staff, talked it up with his fellow patients – and
obtained a promise that, in the future, staff will take pains to make
such dramatic entrances at a more private, rear entrance.

For
one of the first times in his adult life, he didn't get drunk and
stoned over something he can, in fact, change if he only acts with a
positive and socially correct demeanor.

Patient
X says it's all part of a total pattern – the gestalt – of a
situation that is much more powerful than any of its individual
components, an immersive bit of culture shock America's veterans and
military community is experiencing in a new millennium in which
sexual assault is no longer viewed as a sexual act, but one of power
relations skewed and gone horribly wrong.

Therapists
have tapped into the technique; they're using it to their advantage
to break up patterns of thinking, just as other professionals
throughout the culture are using the method to inculcate patterns of
behavior through group thinking.

“They're
trying to provoke some kind of reaction from us,” he mused.

It's
something Patient X sees in his university classwork, on the job,
where he brings bail bond absconders to the bar of justice, and in
the brave new American world at war of the 21st century.

“It's
like what happened in Germany in the twenties and thirties,” he
explains, a time when group thinking, the building of consensus,
began to dictate reality, rather than empirical observations
elucidating a reality perceived from truthful answers to definable
questions.

He
says it scares him, this inexorable thrust to a world of more rigid
control forced by some undefined yet constant emergency.

But
let Patient X tell you his story - in his own way. It is the first
time in his life that he has opened up to the people of the world and
talked about his psychic wounds.

In
this audio segment, Patient X compares and contrasts the world of the
bounty hunter, or bail agent, with that of a trained intelligence
operative working a war zone, a war zone that extends from border to
border in the interior of the U.S., according to new laws such as the
Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act.

He
says it's all about control, a control achieved through intimidation
and fear, anger - and feelings of hate.